Yeah no you are 100% wrong here. I don’t care how well trained your ears are or how much you think you can hear the difference, you will 100% not be able to hear any appreciable difference using consumer mainstream focused earbuds. You know this and are just arguing for the sake of arguing. You know AirPods or any wirelesss earbud do not present enough detail or imaging to hear the difference between bit rates.
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New AirPods Pro Do Not Support Lossless Apple Music
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Well it’s not totally true , if you listen in a very quiet room , with $3000 headphones, a DAC , then you MAY here a trumpet clearer on losless but just a bit and only if you know before that you listen losless music…😂
Lossless = Placebo
Perhaps you should consider Apple's excellent performance under Cook before saying something really absurd like "time for mr Cook to say goodbye and someone competent to step in."
Nobody disputes that lossless is a better quality audio format, it's just the vast majority of users will not be able to perceive a difference or improvement over non-lossless audio when the quality of most audio sources.
If someone thinks lossless is the one thing missing from their AirPods/AirPods Pro experience then they're going to be disappointed. Lossless audio on AirPods Pro isn't going to sound better than a high quality (but non-lossless) track listened to on AirPods Max for a few hundred bucks more.
What I'm saying is at this price level, if someone wants a better experience then their best option is upgrade their hardware, not expect lossless to provide some elevated experience through earbuds because it won't.
I really disagree with this statement, I think people really under estimate ear buds. They are never going to deliver the perfect sound stage (especially when compared to a more sizable listening device), but to say you won't hear the difference is a bit of a stretch IMHO. There would be know way to know this is the case without having access to test lossless vs lossy. Look at my earlier comment to understand my perspective on that.
I didn't say anyone did dispute it, but to say someone will not perceive a difference is a matter of opinion. Do you have quality evidence that backs this up? There are many reasons that they could notice a difference. And if they do not, then it is fine for them to turn it off it there is a benefit to having lossless disabled.
Having lossless provides a guarantee to the user that the Bluetooth codec is NOT a contributing factor in the quality degradation of the audio they are hearing. This is the definition of a true Audiophile IMHO. They seek to reduce quality loss at any point they can have control over. It doesn't have to be the perfect quality audio source - in fact it can be very old records with pops and clicks. The true aim is to not degrade that quality any further than required. Does that make sense?
I get pretty frustrated when people pick a brand new studio quality sample, acquire it via a lossless codec on their computer, then tell me on their cheap old computer headset that is plugged into their old computers analogue audio out ports that they cannot tell the difference between the lossless stream and the high quality lossy version. I fully accept that some audio samples the user will not be able to tell the difference. This doesn't mean lossless codecs/transmission is not important, only that for this situation there is no noticeable difference. For another test, with a different audio source, it could be night and day.
AirPods Max will win on bass frequencies every time because they have a larger driver AirPods Pro. But do you think they will be less clear in the higher frequencies as well, where smaller drivers of AirPods Pro can exhibit better response times? Or are you making an assumption here? Most audio detail is lost in the higher frequencies, so I question your theory. Additionally, when you are out and about, especially for a run, there is a trade off in size, weight etc where the right tool for the job is just as important. I think AirPods Pro (1) put out a pretty decent sound to be honest, sure there are better headphones, but they are very handy.
Let us not cherry pick high quality non-lossless source material, not everyone is listening to that all the time. Lossless is not always about the perfect experience of the most pristine of audio sources, it is about the reduction in audio quality loss from source to speaker. Any place this can be minimised is a win in total enjoyment (storage medium, transmission medium, and reproduction hardware). By not re-compressing an already over compressed stream, you can reduce making that poor quality source even worse by providing it to the speaker without further diminishing its quality.
When i use my Airpods Max with Aux cable, there is a big difference in sound quality. I switched back to Bluetooth i can see the difference immediately. My Airpods Max sound far better via aux cable. I am not an audiophile. but i am a music enthusiast. I am using apple music. All my playlists are losseeless.
Who the heck gives you the right to come here spouting proven facts like that, on an internet forum of all places?
You'd think you'd know better with your post count.
Looking forward to screenshots of the results of you two:
Is your audio system really ready for lossless?
Do an ABX test in your browser, and see if you can tell the difference between lossless and iTunes-compression quality audio
abx.digitalfeed.net
There is no difference. FLAC is lossless, it will result in the same PCM data as the original Wave file.
They don't. As often with Samsung, what they tell and what they do is not the same.
Their "seamless" codec is only about bit depth, for one thing. Not about sample rate. There's a reason they don't call it lossless, because that would be false advertising.
But having 24 bits in a playback system is pointless. Realistically, even with very good DACs you won't get much beyond maybe 20 or 21 bits of actual dynamic range, because there will be too much noise in the system. But in earbuds? Forget it. And if you look at actual music signals, 17.5 to 18 bits are actually enough to cover the signal (this is basically one of mechanisms behind MQA).
There are known test methodologies to objectively verify whether a listener can actually identify differences.
AFAIK lossy codecs in modern use for music should not typically introduce differences perceivable under test, but of course your mileage may vary.
You can do the test yourself with your own equipment and audio samples if you want to validate your own hypothesis.
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Did I read correctly on the product page that the new AirPods won't be fully supported (i.e. just regular Bluetooth ear buds) on iPads and Macs until the latest versions of iPadOS and MacOS Ventura come out later? Or did I just misinterpret the system requirements?
This is where the distinction gets lost for most people. If you listen to crappy res content, a hi-res pipe isn’t going to make any difference. It’s an end-to-end proposition.
Early on, when music was converted to CD, often times engineers used bad source material to do it. When iTunes came along, they exacerbated the situation by using that bad content and dumming-down the bit rate further. As a result, we created an entire generation of people who didn’t know what music should sound like. Now, with even better recording equipment than ever before, this isn’t necessary. The problem is, we have listeners who are ambivalent at best. 99%+ of listening is being performed in noisy environments. Lossless doesn’t matter there.
As I mentioned in an earlier post to this thread, Apple is missing the boat on high-quality audio content and devices — leaving the gap to be filled by others. They could own this market, but like many listeners, they seem to be ambivalent as well. Hi-res and lossless listening can be heard and appreciated, in spite of what many on this thread have said, but only if a tech company like Apple steps up and says “We’re going to do it — end to end”.
As with many things Apple does these days, it seems they’ve lost their adventurous spirit to take something like this on.
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Hi-res has been tested to be indistinguishable from 44.1kHz/16bit resolution audio, as expected by sampling theory and our understanding of human hearing limitations. Hi-res audio makes sense during production but not much for end-user consumption.
Lossy encodings can introduce audible artifacts. Whether these are perceivable in practice depends on a lot of factors.
No. Not ever. It's 100% bull. The only time hi-res sounds better than 16/44 is when the hi-res masters sound better to start with. Down-sample the better-sounding hi-res masters to 16/44 and they still sound exactly the same.
It doesn't matter if you don't understand why, or if you disagree. You're still wrong.
And I'm not prepared to explain why, when no words on a computer screen has ever changed the mind of someone who is convinced they are right. Otherwise if you was open to the idea that you are maybe wrong, you'd do your own research, and conclude the same outcome, without my input.
You're dealing with the theoretical. Studies have been done over and over - even on high-end equipment - and people cannot tell the difference in any meaningful way. It's easy to say you can over the internet, its another thing to post a blind ABX test that you've done with Airpods Pro using a lossless and lossy version of the same track. Forget about big studies and errors in methods - just do a test yourself.
If you can truly hear a difference - which I will seriously doubt because everyone online who says they can hear the difference can't be telling the truth - then great. You do you. And if you know you can't hear a difference but want lossless "just because", that's fine too.
But disagreeing with facts doesn't make them less true. Most people cannot hear a difference. That's the simple fact. And even the small percent of those who can hear the difference in high-end equipment in optimal acoustic settings are almost certainly not able to do so with any form of earbud.
Ultimately it’s not the compression quality of the audio so much as what our brains fill in for missing information. That’s why lossless or lossy, mp3 or mp4 don’t really matter. It’s all in the ear, um, the brain of the beholder.